Daniela Arias

Reservoir and Completions Engineer

[email protected]

Daniela Arias Ortiz is a reservoir and completions engineer at ResFrac, focusing on reservoir data analysis, improving workflows, and customer support.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from the National University of Colombia in 2017. Her curiosity for unconventional reservoirs took her to Saudi Arabia in 2018, where she pursued her Master’s and PhD at KAUST University. There, she dove deep into understanding flow behavior in hydraulically fractured shale wells, the impact of hydraulic fracture geometry on well productivity, and forecasting field production from shale reservoirs.

When she’s not solving reservoir puzzles, Daniela enjoys live music, trying new foods, and staying active. You can often find her climbing, hiking, doing CrossFit, or practicing aerial silks. Although she doesn’t dive, Daniela enjoys snorkeling and exploring the underwater world. She’s also a coffee enthusiast who loves traveling, especially when it involves exploring new cultures!

Daniela's posts

$Horizontal fracture initiated along weak bedding plane or frictional interface in ResFrac$

Horizontal hydraulic fractures in ResFrac

Horizontal hydraulic fracture propagation is believed to be widespread in shale plays where the frac gradient approaches the overburden – such as the Vaca Muerta, Utica, and Montney. However, horizontal propagation is nearly always ignored in hydraulic fracture modeling. In ResFrac, we are obsessed with ‘getting the physics right’, and so naturally, we extended our simulator to handle horizontal fracturing. The first version of this new capability was released earlier this year. We are eager to start collecting feedback from users, which will help us to fine tune the algorithm and workflow.

Advanced ‘proppant transport in the well’ capabilities are now implemented in ResFrac!

Proppant transport in the well is an intriguing topic that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years [1-8]. Proppant transport processes determine the uniformity of proppant placement, which has a direct impact on productivity. Cipolla et al. estimate that the difference between poor and excellent proppant uniformity is about $2.5M in net present value per well.

Digesting the Bonkers, Incredible, Off-the-Charts, Spectacular Results from the Fervo and FORGE Enhanced Geothermal Projects

I’m out of superlatives – I used them all up in the title. But seriously – Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) projects have had a really, really good summer. In this article, I summarize the results that have been recently presented by Fervo and FORGE. At their annual Tech Day and in a white paper posted this week (Norbeck et al., 2024), Fervo Energy provided their first update on Project Cape, a Utah project where they are developing 400 MWe of new production over the next two years. So far, fourteen wells have been drilled, and three of them have been stimulated.